Conscious awareness & Consciousness, Unconsciousness

"Lack of conscious awareness is not simply part of the conscious or unconscious. It does not designate a level of consciousness. It designates a different process in the activity of consciousness. I tie a knot. I do it consciously. I cannot, however, say precisely how I have done it. My action, which is conscious, turns out to be lacking in conscious awareness because my attention is directed toward the act of tying, not on how I carry out that act. Consciousness always represents some piece of reality. The object of my consciousness in this example is the tying of the knot, that is, the knot and what I do with it. However, the actions that I carry out in tying the knot – what I am doing – is not the object of my consciousness. However, it can become the object of consciousness when there is conscious awareness. Conscious awareness is an act of consciousness whose object is the activity of consciousness itself." ---Vygotsky (Thinking and Speech) 

 Vygotsky stated that consciousness development is an integral process of children, connected with perception, memory, and attention. What confused me a lot is how human beings' actions and language facilitate this transformative process. Vygotsky highlighted the difference between lack of conscious awareness and unconscious. From his example, the action and the object are differentiated separately. If people's attention is on the object itself, then we could say, there is consciousness towards the object, but not a kind of conscious awareness. Only when people's attention is directed at the action, conscious awareness could emerge. It makes me rethink of human beings' learning behavior. Does that mean only when we pay attention to how we learn rather than the learning content itself, our conscious awareness arises? If it is so, how language plays its role in this process? Why human's attention couldn't be directed to actions without language? Or for animals, won't they develop conscious awareness without human-like language systems? 



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